This post’s subtitle is slightly oversimplified. Apart from deliberate and obvious ambiguity in language jokes, ambiguity is almost always unwanted and at least a little harmful to clear communication. It can be disastrous. Suppose I write something ambiguous that I interpret one way. Suppose the reader interprets it differently w/o noticing the ambiguity. (Verbal ambiguities tend to be much less obvious than visual ones.) Maybe the reader just writes me off as a jerk. Maybe the reader objects in a way that makes no sense to me because I also do not notice the ambiguity. Maybe we eventually sort it all out after wasting time in an unpleasant exchange; maybe not. Ambiguous language can act as if the artist in the famous duck/rabbit illusion sees only the duck while the viewer sees only the rabbit.

Don’t context and common sense make it obvious how to resolve ambiguities in real life? Yes and no. Speech among native speakers on familiar topics may be safe, especially if the conversation has many redundancies and/or few surprizes. In a casual setting, a hearer who notices an ambiguity can request and get a clarification in real time. Not all settings are casual. Not all ambiguities are noticed. After briefly considering a setting quite unlike casual speech, we will ponder how to cope with ambiguity in the vast middle ground between utterly casual speech and utterly formal prose.

That English has become the global language of science is convenient for anglophones like me. A few centuries ago, I would have needed to read and write in Latin to communicate with colleagues who did not speak English when asking what’s for dinner. Now I can write in English, but I must be mindful that readers may not be native speakers and may not understand slang and topical references (especially if I write something still worth reading some years from now). Common sense will not help readers decide what I really mean if I garble something new and contrary to conventional wisdom.

Blog posts land in a wide swath of middle ground. Some are close to casual speech; some are researched and/or crafted. Some are for venting or sharing a self-explanatory image; some do try to say something new and contrary to conventional wisdom. Much of the care taken by good science writers to avoid ambiguity is also appropriate to some blog posts. Personally, I find it easier (as well as safer) to make being careful habitual rather than decide whether it really matters in each specific case.

This post’s examples deal with lexicographic ambiguity. They are good for displaying how a readabilist perspective differs from a descriptivist or prescriptivist perspective. They are also conveniently short, so I will devote a little space to historical remarks inspired by one of Lynch’s chapters on lexicography.

Chapter 10 begins with a humorous account of the absurdly apocalyptic reaction to the publication of a dictionary in 1961. True, it was not just any dictionary. It was Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (hereafter just “Webster’s 3-rd”), and it was more explicitly descriptive (rather than prescriptive) than its predecessor. As Lynch explains in detail, good dictionaries had always been more descriptive than those who were shocked by Webster’s 3-rd noticed. But Webster’s 3-rd took descriptivism past a tipping point. Was it open to specific objections about how common (and/or harmless?) some mistakes must be, before they should be just be listed as alternative usages w/o being stigmatized in any way? Yes. Was it part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to repopulate the world with licentious ninnies? No. Many critics really were that wacky, as Lynch reminded me.

The furor led to the 1962 publication of a compilation by Sledd and Ebbitt of essays pro and con, with the title Dictionaries and That Dictionary. Reading and reacting to that compilation was the best part of the AP English class that capped my high school education. I came down hard for descriptivism, w/o noticing many amusing ironies that Lynch points out. Some of the alleged crimes of Webster’s 3-rd had already been committed by the revered Webster’s 2-nd, which had been marketed with authoritarian hype that came back to haunt the publisher in the furor over Webster’s 3-rd.

Lynch’s book came out in 2009, much closer on the calendar to 2017 than to 1961. Calendar distance can be misleading. In 2009, the USA was still one of many countries where authoritarian rants could be laughed off. They did not come from the White House.

Example 5.1: Tummy Troubles

On pages 223 and 224 (hardcover), Lynch uses 3 words to illustrate how a rival dictionary that began as a knee-jerk prescriptivist alternative to Webster’s 3-rd evolved into a rational one. The same words illustrate the kind of rule a readabilist can recommend.

Consider 3 things I might conceivably say about Donald Trump:

He is nauseating.

He is nauseated.

He is nauseous.

Items #1 and #2 are clear. But what if I said #3? From a correct assumption about my politics (and an incorrect assumption about a fondness for older usages), U could infer that #3 from me means what #1 means. But #3 from somebody else (who likes newer usages and was a dinner guest at the White House) could well mean what #2 means. However loudly prescriptivists might claim that [nauseous] “really” means what [nauseating] means, the word [nauseous] is hopelessly ambiguous in the real world. I cannot imagine any situation where this particular ambiguity would be wanted, so I offer a rule:

Never use the word [nauseous].
Use what clearly says whatever U want to say.

Please be assured that I am well aware of the wisdom in the old saying

Never say [never]!

and once was in a situation where I did want to write ambiguously. But not about tummy troubles.

Example 5.2: Accidental Arson

People for whom English is a second language sometimes say things that native speakers never say. I have a CD of Chinese music with a track list that displays a translation of each track’s title from Chinese into English. One of the translations is [Blue Little Flower]. Before seeing that mistake, I had not noticed that native speakers of English put size before color (as in [Little Red Hen] or [big blue eyes]). The mistaken translation is harmless in the CD track list; I only bring it up to show that nonnative speakers may blunder in ways that native speakers would not.

Suppose I tell the translator that toluene is “inflammable” w/o further explanation. Suppose the translator is familiar with some pairs of adjectives like [accessible]/[inaccessible] and [voluntary]/[involuntary] (and many more between these). Suppose the translator looks up [flammable] in an English/Chinese dictionary, extrapolates from the usual effect on meaning of prefixing [i][n] to an adjective, and thinks it safe to have a smoke in a room reeking of glue fumes. Oops.

Likely? No. Possible? Yes. At best, to say or write [inflammable] wastes a syllable or 2 keystrokes. A tiny downside is certain, a huge downside is possible, and there is no upside (unless U want to write weird poetry).

Never use the word [inflammable].
It may be ambiguous to nonnative speakers.

Mother : How was school today?
Small Child : Fun. Teacher showed us how to make babies.
Mother : What? WHAT?
Small Child : Drop the Y and add IES.

In casual speech, we can insert “the word” in a few places. That is clunky in extended writing. There are 2 common ways to do the job in writing: quote marks and italics. Using quote marks works well in short documents, but it can be confusing in longer ones that also use quote marks for actual quotations and/or for sarcasm, as in

After an ad blitz from the National Rifle Association rescued his failing campaign, Senator Schmaltz “bravely” defended the right of crazy people to buy assault weapons.

Maybe we should follow Lynch and use the convention popular among those who are most fastidious about the difference between using a word and discussing it: those who often call it the “use/mention distinction” and put words being mentioned (rather than used) in italics. I do not mind doing w/o italics for emphasis because I prefer bold anyway, but italics are also used for titles and for foreign words temporarily imported into English. I want those uses, and I found that Lynch’s use of italics for multiple purposes in quick succession invited confusion.

There is a simple way to give any word or phrase a name that works well here and in many other contexts, tho not universally. Wrap it in square brackets (or curly braces). Choose the wrapper U never (well, hardly ever) use for some other purpose in the current document and run with it. If both wrappers are OK, use square brackets and give the Shift key a rest.

Now I can avoid confusion, even if I want to be emphatic, be sarcastic, and mention words (marking some as foreign), all in the same sentence:

Some snobs flaunt their “education” by saying [Weltanshauung] when [worldview] is all they need.

While not so disgusting as Senator Schmaltz, the flaunting snobs are enemies of clarity. An enemy of my friend is my enemy too, and clarity is both a very dear friend and a concept crucial to amicable resolution of some of the tensions that Lynch explores so ably. So I want to be especially clear and hope U will forgive the digression into metametalanguage. Will put a quick reminder of the square brackets convention early in each subsequent post. The next one will get down to business.

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Introduction

Writing well ain’t easy. If the word “ain’t” in the previous sentence raised hackles, U really need to read The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch. If not? Read it anyway. This post starts a series of posts that includes a glowing review of the book, with my own additions and amplifications for some points (and a few mild disagreements).

One of the few complaints I have about the book is that the title is too narrow. Yes, the book considers lexicography. It also considers grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vulgarisms. In just 276 well-written pages (not counting source notes and such), it considers all these things with serious historical scholarship and considerable humor (mostly dry; sometimes LOL).

Why a series of posts? Doing justice to the scope of the book in a single post would be tough unless what I wrote was only a book review, and the single post might still be quite long. Better to write a separate post of moderate length on each of several themes in the book, adding something worthwhile to each. In between posts in this Writing Well series, I can post on other topics. If I think of yet another way that the sane and decent people in the USA might resist the Age of Trumpery, I want to interrupt the series rather than interrupt work on a single humongous draft.

Can a noncontiguous series work? Across the Room and Into the Fire is working quite well for Óglach, with Part 6 (out of a projected 7) posted as of this writing.

Example 1.1: Recency of “Proper” English

Example numbers in this series have the form (part number).(number within the part), just in case I want to refer to an example in one part when writing up another part.

The following quote from page 10 of the book poses a conundrum that cries out for the kind of historical investigation exemplified by the book.

For just one third of 1 percent of the history of language in general, and for just 20 percent of the history of our own language, have we had to go to school to study the language we already speak.

When something is that strange, asking how the Hell it happened is not just idle curiosity. It might lead to major insights. Here is something similarly strange in physics.

For every chunk of matter in the entire universe (no matter what it is made of), the gravitational mass is exactly the same as the inertial mass.

For everything we can get our hands on, the equality of the 2 kinds of mass has been verified to more decimal places than I can count on my fingers. Why is gravity like this? Isaac Newton had no idea at all. His theory of gravity could use this fact but could not explain it. Early in the previous century, many physicists were uneasy about this apparent cosmic coincidence. They were also uneasy about a piddling tiny difference between how Mercury orbited the sun and how Newton’s theory predicted it would orbit the sun.

One of the uneasy physicists was Albert Einstein, whose more elaborate theory of gravity gave an elegant explanation of the equality of the 2 kinds of mass and yielded predictions that were slightly different from Newton’s. When Einstein published his theory in 1916, the only known differences were just barely measurable by those who cared about nerdy stuff like the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit. Today, we know of many other differences. Thanks to our knowledge of some of them, your GPS is more than just an expensive paperweight.

Acknowledgements

Jack Lynch wrote the book that anchors this series. The historical perspective helped me refine my own views. Want to see many examples of clear writing that is balanced and nuanced w/o being wishy-washy? Read the book.

Óglach is among the bloggers who demonstrate that good writing can thrive in the blogosphere. Thanking all those I know would take up too much space and omit those I do not know, but I must thank him for the inspiration to try a noncontiguous series.

Miriam Sargon taught the AP English class that I took in my senior year of high school. (My post on lexicography will say a little more about that class.) Back in the 1962/1963 academic year, well-informed people could still believe that Enlightenment values were winning (albeit slowly and with many setbacks). She did not preach those values; she exemplified them.